Insurance Paid Advertising to Drive High-Quality Leads

Paid online advertising can be key to growing your business. You can raise awareness, drive potential groups to your agency, and differentiate your services from your competitors?. But creating an ad and sitting back is not enough to drive traffic to your website. Paid online advertising is a crowded market, competition is high, and it can be intimidating if you don’t know how it works. Your ads need to target the right audience with the right message. In this week’s post, we share the do’s and don’ts in insurance paid advertising to make sure you are only paying for high-quality leads.

Do Know The Territory When Creating Insurance Paid Advertising

Paid online advertising started with static images at the top of a website. Now there are a wide variety of formats with specific characteristics to consider depending on your goals.

Display Ads

Display ads are the closest to the original form of online advertising and they are the most affordable. These types of ads appear on third party websites that are usually related to your service or content. They come in different forms, like banners, text, floating banners, wallpaper, popup ads, or flash. To place your ad, you can contact the third party directly or you could use the Google Display Network, that allows for demographic, geographic, contextual, and/or behavioral targeting.

Search Ads

Search ads are precisely that, ads appearing on a search engine results page. They are formatted like any other search result but it says “Ad” next to them. Google’s algorithm decides which ads are shown to each user based, broadly, on location, content, and keywords. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is the most common type of search ad. These types of ads allow you to bid on relevant keywords that will boost your chance to be displayed to users when they enter specific search queries.

Social Media Ads

50% of Gen Z and 42% of millennials think social media is the most relevant channel for ads. The greatest strength of paid social media advertising is the granularity with which you can target your prospective clients. Social media platforms are made of profiles, which you can use to filter your audience by demographic data such as age, gender, income, or education. But also by interests, profiles they follow, things they buy, or the news they read. Specifically for insurance brokers, we recommend exploring LinkedIn Ads since you could filter HR professionals, specifically managers, in companies with the number of lives you are interested in.

Video Ads

When video became popular, video ads came along. Video ads give you the opportunity to be more creative. Your products or services don’t necessarily have to be shown, your videos can be informative or educational, you can shoot a “how-to”, and you have a great variety of platforms to post it, like Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Hulu.

Specifically, when looking at insurance paid advertising, we recommend trying different options. As we mentioned before, there are a wide variety of formats, all of them with advantages and disadvantages. Research and find out what works best for your agency.

Don’t Forget Your Ads

Review results and track your paid advertising campaign regularly. If you don’t have a tracking system for your paid online advertising, running these ads is a waste of time and money. Reviewing results and tracking your ads will help you identify which ones are more successful, which keywords you should focus on, and it will help you tweak your campaigns to improve them. The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track.

Wait for your analytics to accumulate information to revisit it with statistically significant results. You could start reviewing your results monthly and, once you have results, you can start making changes. For example, changing keywords that are underperforming and trying new ones. Refining your ads should be an important task. Google Analytics is a great tool for insurance paid advertising because it lets you create a customized URL to track the performance of each of them and compare them on one dashboard.

Do Create Relevant Content for Your Insurance Paid Advertising

The text or copy of your ad is key regardless of the format, but the characters you can fit in your paid ad are usually limited. Your ads need to be clear and concise since your audience will only take action if they understand them.

Research Keywords

Keywords are the words your audience is using to look for what they are interested in. When writing the text for your ads, it’s important to keep keywords in mind since you don’t want to target very broad keywords (head terms) that are more expensive and less effective. Research your long-tail keywords, that are usually longer and, subsequently, more specific. For example, the term “insurance plans” is considered a head keyword. This keyword is searched frequently, but that also means that the competition for it is higher. The term “best health insurance for company of 25 employees” can be the long tail keyword specific to your insurance agency, which will be less expensive and more accurate.

Less Is More

If you have different messages or a big amount of information that you want to convert into an ad, make them into multiple campaigns and ads, don’t try to make everything fit into one. For example, if you want to advertise your services and you also want to communicate a special offer or a discount, create an ad campaign for your services and create a different ad for each of them. Then, create another campaign for your offers or discounts and, again, create an ad for each of them.

Be Visual

People retain 65% of the information in an ad for three days if it’s paired with relevant visual content. The text is important, but use images, video, or slideshows to get your audience’s attention whenever you can, and boost your insurance paid advertising.

Call To Action

This step is crucial to convert the users that see your ads into leads and, later, customers. The call to action should be clear and it should take them to a specific landing page. On this landing page, it’s important to craft a customized message to continue the narrative you started with your ad for those incoming prospects.

Don’t Target Everyone When Setting Up Insurance Paid Advertising

Paid online advertising has a cost per click (CPC). CPC is the actual price you pay for each click in your campaign. If you don’t define your audience thoroughly and you target the wrong prospects, the engagement with your ad will be low, which will escalate to poor click-through rates and to a nonexistent conversion. Consequently, the cost to show your ads to more people will go up, and the result is expensive campaigns shown to fewer people.

To avoid this happening, you need to know your target audience. You can’t create insurance paid advertising and put it out in the world without knowing who your prospective clients are. Research and target the specific type of users that are interested in your services. For example, as we mentioned before, you could use LinkedIn Ads to filter by job title and target HR managers.

Final Thoughts About Insurance Paid Advertising

Insurance paid advertising can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and generate conversions when done properly. If you are new to setting up a paid advertising campaign, research your target audience and define your prospective clients, figure out the best long-tail keywords to target them with, and, once you have your campaign up and running, don’t forget about it. Tweaking your ads is an important step to achieve a successful paid advertising strategy. Insurance paid advertising is definitely an effective way for businesses of all sizes to gain visibility and find new customers, but it requires time, effort, and commitment.